There’s little question that SpaceX’s launch of Falcon Heavy was historic, this
is a truly huge development in the exploration of space that allows an expansion of our heavy
lift capabilities, but has also rekindled interest in space simply by virtue of launching
something unusual; Elon’s Musk’s Tesla roadster.
The roadster launch garnered the attention of tens of millions on YouTube alone, making
it well worth it as far as science outreach and inspiration goes.
But launching odd items into space in general is nothing new.
And in fact, the roadster might not even be the strangest object ever launched.
So here are 10 really unusual items humans have launched into space.
Number 10 Mutating Tomatoes
Flying tomatoes into space on its face isn’t surprising, they are a popular food item.
But what happens when you fly them just to see what space does to them when you grow
them back on earth.
Oddly, this has happened multiple times.
The first story here is rather murky, the cosmonaut Volkov tomato.
Heirloom tomato gardeners will probably know of this variety of tomato as it’s commonly
available in seed catalogs.
But how did it get the name of a famous cosmonaut?
As it turns out, there are two stories floating around.
One is that the Soviet Union launched tomato seeds into low earth orbit and then distributed
them for cultivation after landing to see if exposure to space did anything and it’s
been bred ever since.
Another is that a soviet space program engineer developed the strain here on earth, and simply
named it after his friend Cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov, who died in an accident in space in
1971.
Regardless of which account is true, someone bringing tomato seeds into space and returning
them safely to the earth to see what happens is a certainty.
Back in the 1980’s NASA brought them up on the Space Shuttle and then left them on
a satellite, then retrieved them some time later and distributed the seeds to schools
for in classroom experiments.
Everything was all fun and games until someone suggested that exposure to cosmic rays could
have mutated the tomatoes and made them poisonous once grown.
It turns out they were fine, and even more seeds were sent to the ISS in 2016.
Those, however stayed safely in the space station and were mostly just subject to a
period of zero G. I haven’t eaten any of NASA’s space tomatoes, but I have grown
Cosmonaut Volkov’s and they’re delicious.
Number 9 Dinosaurs
Not only have the dinosaurs been to space, but twice, though they weren’t alive.
In 1985 76 million year old bits of bone and shell from maiasaura peeblesorum were flown
on Spacelab 2, for no other reason than it seemed a cool idea.
In 1998 a small dinosaur skull was flown to Mir and returned to earth, again because it
was cool.
I certainly get the concept of science outreach and doing cool things in space just because
they’re cool, but somehow I doubt the dinosaurs would have been too happy with this, especially
in light that their extinction was directly related to space.
Number 8 The Man Who Discovered Pluto
I doubt astronomer Clyde Tombaugh would have ever thought, as a young man, that he would
go on to discover a planet.
And then that planet got demoted to a minor planet.
And then Tombaugh would go on to fly past that planet, yes, planet, at breakneck speed
and then rocket off into deep space to become the furthest human as such from earth.
But that’s what happened.
While studying photographic plates using a device called a blink comparator to look for
minute movements of objects in space, he ended up discovering Pluto.
He also discovered quite a few asteroids using this method.
A sample of Tombaugh’s ashes were included on the first spacecraft to visit Pluto, New
Horizons.
And if that’s not cool enough, Tombaugh may technically become the first human to
leave the solar system.
Who knows where his ashes will end up, but oddly, also included on this mission was a
nuclear power source consisting of plutonium.
This element was named after the planet Pluto to keep in line with the then current naming
scheme of newly discovered elements.
They were named after planets, such as Uranium and Neptunium.
Trouble is, Pluto has been demoted, which makes it sort of ridiculous that we have an
element named after a Kuiper Belt object.
But good luck renaming plutonium.
Given that New Horizons also revealed that Pluto was far more interesting of a world
than we could have ever imagined, and it’s so ingrained in global and scientific culture,
Mickey Mouse’s dog is named after this thing, I think maybe we should start calling it a
planet again.
Or at least give it it’s own classification, perhaps call it a plunot.
Number 7 Really Crazy Hand Guns
You normally wouldn’t think you’d need a gun in space and even if you did firing
it in an airtight spacecraft would be beyond dangerous but for years Soviet cosmonauts
were in fact equipped with firearms.
And they were no normal handguns, they had triple barrels.
The reasoning for packing heat was simple and it had nothing to do with encountering
hostile aliens.
The truth is, capsules parachute landing in Siberia might not be immediately retrievable,
leaving cosmonauts on their own until help arrived.
Given that there are dangerous animals living in Siberia such as bears and wolves, it was
deemed necessary for the cosmonauts to be ready to defend themselves if need be, or
even hunt.
Number 6 Delivery Pizza
It’s the age of pizza.
From its simpler, though really delicious beginnings as a local food in Naples, Italy,
this food has taken over the world and pizza restaurants serving hundreds of variations
can be found ubiquitously in numerous countries, and that trend grows.
One of the hallmarks of pizza is that they are easily delivered if the customer wants
to order in, and they make for awesome leftovers the next day.
But has pizza left earth?
Yes.
In the furthest reach of pizza delivery so far, RosCosmos delivered a pizza to the International
Space Station in 2001.
Commissioned to do so by pizza hut, and costing that company over a million dollars, the delivery
pizza was consumed by cosmonaut Yuri Yusachov.
But exposure to low earth orbit conditions deadens taste buds, so the company spiced
the pizza up a bit more than usual, and had to use salami as a topping due to the delivery
taking far longer than the usual half hour, raising questions about toppings and shelf-lives
in a space capsule traveling to the ISS.
Even still, the cosmonaut gave a thumbs up after dinner and seemed to enjoy it.
Number 5 Golf Equipment
In 1971 NASA astronaut Alan Shepard famously pulled out a golf club and shot a few golf
balls on the lunar surface during the Apollo 14 mission.
While we don’t know the actual numbers until someone actually goes up there and finds the
golf balls if they haven’t disintegrated and actually measure it, this was almost certainly
a semi-permanent golfing record as one of the golf balls may have gone for miles.
Oddly enough, this was probably not sanctioned by NASA.
Story is Sheppard smuggled a makeshift golf club head on the mission and mounted it on
a lunar sample taking instrument and just went ahead and took the shot.
That makeshift golf club made it back to earth and is displayed at the USGA’s museum.
Number 4 A poster for a minor Val Kilmer Movie Stuck to a Wheel of Cheese
Alright, this was SpaceX again and Elon’s humor.
In 2010 it was revealed that aboard SpaceX’s first dragon capsule there was a wheel of
cheese, a nod to a Monty Python sketch where John Cleese wanted to buy cheese from a cheese
shop that didn’t carry it, along with an image of the movie poster for the Val Kilmer
movie Top Secret!.
Anyone remember that one?
Oddly, this time SpaceX chose to keep their cargo secret until after the launch as not
to overshadow the success of Dragon.
With Falcon Heavy and the Tesla Roadster, clearly they have gotten over this shyness
about their occasionally odd cargos.
Number 3 Salmonella
It’s only natural to study earth bacteria in space.
What can be learned from doing so can shed light on human illness and treatment.
Salmonella is no exception, and it was flown twice on the space shuttle to the international
space station.
While it may not be all that weird to fly salmonella, what happened to it while in space
certainly was.
You would think taking an organism out of its native environment would put it at a disadvantage
and weaken it.
Not in this case, the salmonella became 3 to 7 times more dangerous after spending time
in space.
It appears that the bacteria were tricked into thinking that they were inside a human
body rather than space.
This is believed to be because of fluid shear, once they attach themselves the walls of human
intestines, the salmonella bacteria experience a condition of very low fluid shear, which
might signal them to switch on certain parts of their genome and, well, become more dangerous
and make their host sick.
As it turns out, zero gravity also is a low fluid shear environment.
Number 2 Nudes
Clothing on earth is a cultural thing.
Most human cultures prefer some form of it, especially if they are native to cold climates.
But not all.
As a consequence, it may be that the entire galaxy is clothing optional, depending on
the species and culture and the environment they evolved in, though I would say it might
be reasonable to expect one piece of clothing that might be common among most biological
space-faring species, the space suit.
That aside, if you look at most representations of humans in our cultures, our photographs
and other technological records of us, say our television broadcasts that aliens might
intercept.
They would see us as a strangely clothed species, perhaps the aliens might wonder if Batman’s
suit was really a part of his body, or they might think the whole thing silly and wonder
why we once restricted ourselves with steel armor in battle instead of genetically modifying
ourselves to grow a decently protective carapace.
But some earth scientists would have no part of this, and felt it best to depict humans
as we really are.
It was Carl Sagan, Eric Burgess and Frank Drake, and they rightly surmised that, well,
one thing about humans is that we’re all naked under our clothes.
So Sagan went with depicting humans as humans in all our glory.
It is the Pioneer Plaque, and there are two of them, one on Pioneer 10 and one on Pioneer
11.
It’s actually pretty unlikely anyone will ever intercept our nudes we’ve sent out,
in fact it may be more likely that we intercept them and take them back to museums in the
future, but if left on their own the plaque on Pioneer 10 will eventually pass near the
star Aldebaran and then on to parts unknown.
It’s anyone’s guess what Pioneer 11 will eventually encounter, in other words, we’ve
lost control of our nudes as they happily galavant across the galaxy.
Number 1 The Nuclear Manhole Cover
This one may or may not have made it into space, this is something that has been debated
for years.
But if it did, and we’ll likely never know, it would be among the first manmade objects
into space and probably the strangest.
It all goes back to a nuclear test conducted in 1957.
During this test, a 2000 pound steel plate was placed atop a test shaft.
As the experiment detonated, it travelled up this shaft and propelled the plate into
the air at about six times the escape velocity of planet earth.
What happened then is anyone’s guess, though no trace of the plate was ever found.
It might have vaporized in the atmosphere, or some parts of it might have made it into
space and off into the solar system and beyond.
So count Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster as just the next in a long series of odd objects we’ve
sent into space over the years.
And we should send more.
Who knows who might pass through the solar system and find our remnants floating in space.
After all, one species’ trash is another species’ confirmation that they are not
alone.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently worried about the
Mad Max movies.
In such a scenario, I want the Tesla electric driverless thunder vehicle.
Mel Gibson always had to worry about gasoline -- don’t have to worry about that with solar
panels and batteries -- and even when he had gas he still had to keep his eyes on the road
while others repelled the marauders, seriously like the last 20 minutes of Road Warrior is
everyone fighting while Mel Gibson just sort of drives.
Tesla could fix this, but we’re gonna need need some gun turrets and be sure to check
out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel for regular,
in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing
universe in which we life.